Comics Legend Todd McFarlane Talks About His Contribution to the Invasion! Crossover

When The CW announced that The Dominators would be the major threat on the four-show Invasion! crossover (airing this week at 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday), one of the first comments to come out of the producers' offices was Arrow and DC's Legends of Tomorrow EP Marc Guggenheim praising the work of Todd McFarlane, the Image Comics co-founder who drew the first part of the original Invasion! crossover and whose gritty, creepy approach to The Dominators became a kind of touchstone for artists who would work on them after him.

"This year, for our mega 'Arrowverse' crossover, we're taking inspiration from a DC crossover from the late 1980s known as Invasion!, which featured an alien race called the Dominators, who'd previously vexed the Legion of Superheroes," Guggenheim said at the time. "We're using cutting edge prosthetics and computer effects to achieve a feature film-quality look which is faithful to Invasion! artist Todd McFarlane's interpretation of the characters."

The on-screen Dominators, as they eventually were revealed, have turned out to be veiny, creepy, and generally monstrous. That is, per a recent ComicBook.com interview with McFarlane, exactly what he was going for.

"It's interesting: you give the same character to five different artists and we're all going to do our thing if you will," McFarlane told us. "I've always been a big believer and fan of monsters, so if you're going to do monsters -- and that's a big artistic bucket, when you say monsters -- I think they should look creepy. They should feel imposing and you shouldn't look at a monster at any time and not be sort of taken aback by them. I'm always looking at other people's and sometimes you get a monster with hair and it looks like it's just been combed, or something with big teeth and they look like they've just been to the orthodontist. To me, a monster's like an animal. They get scruffy skin, their teeth rot, they get circles under their eyes. It's hard for me to imagine that the aliens -- even though I know they're intelligent -- are first and foremost concerned with their beauty regimen. I treat them more as if they're hunters."

As far as those kind words from the producers are concerned? McFarlane says at least some of that credit belongs with Keith Giffen, who co-wrote the series with the great Bill Mantlo, in addition to providing thumbnail layouts for the series and drawing some of it once McFarlane had to back out due to scheduling conflicts.

"I'd like to take credit, but let me place credit where credit is due. Keith Giffen and Bill Mantlo were writing the book, and Keith was doing rough thumbnails for us, too, so that the book would have a sense of consistency to it. So the early design in its generic sense was handed over to me when I got it. All I did was, once you get a silhouette of something, my job is to make it as sexy as possible. I got, 'Okay, some guys with big heads and big teeth on them,' and you try to make it look as cool as possible. Sometimes when you give aliens big heads, it can look a little silly or a little goofy, almost cartoonish, but I was trying to make it look as cool as possible."

And while McFarlane had to leave the series, and has enjoyed a long and storied career since -- "We're going deep into the archives for this one," he joked when we told him that we wanted to talk about Invasion! -- he both acknowledged and explained an old rumor we had heard -- namely that he has sometimes said that not completing Invasion! was one of his few career regrets.

"Yeah," McFarlane said when asked. "But I remember I was in the middle of doing Spider-Man and Invasion! -- and one of the issues, or at least one of the chapters, I inked myself, too. I was pencilling and inking Spider-Man, which I think was coming out twice a month, at the time -- so I was doing the equivalent of four people's work, and then the Invasion! stuff came. I remember it was this moment in my life where it was just a ton of work and at some point I had to say 'Uncle.' I couldn't do it because I was doing a disservice to all of it."

Arrow, The Flash, and Supergirl will cross over with DC's Legends of Tomorrow this week in "Invasion!" a three-part crossover that starts in the final moments of an episode of Supergirl and then plays through the other series. Based on the 1988 comic book event miniseries Invasion! from Keith Giffen, Bill Mantlo, Todd McFarlane, Bart Sears, and the crossover -- with its marketing title "Heroes vs. Aliens" -- will closely track the plot of that storyline: aliens will be assembled by The Dominators and descend on Earth to bring an end to the "threat" of Earth's burgeoning metahuman community.

In the comics, the Dominion were secretly hoping to build their own super-race, and as a result created a handful of new superheroes in the course of the story.

In the TV version, rather than assembling a loose alliance of dangerous alien races, the Dominators will apparently be mind-controlling the aliens that join them. That's a revelation that suggests even the heroes might be forced to take one another (or at least the alien Supergirl) on at some point in the story.

NEXT: The Flash, Arrow, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow Crossover Trailer / First Look At The Dominators / Invasion! Crossover Promo Photos / Potential The Flash Spoiler Spotted On Set / Will Joe West Die During The Invasion! Crossover? / Enter To Win An Ultra-Rare Invasion! Crossover T-Shirt

Supergirl airs Mondays at 8 p.m. ET/PT; The Flash on Tuesdays at the same time; Arrow on Wednesdays and DC's Legends of Tomorrow on Thursdays. All four series air on The CW. The "Invasion!" crossover will air beginning November 28.